Public blockchains have the potential to become the financial rails of the world, but public money will never become the world's money. And that's exactly what I want to talk about today. I am Paul Henry Keefash. I am the founder and CEO of Unlink. We are essentially a company that builds a privacy and compliance infrastructure for companies that want to move money on the blockchain.
Real amounts are real. Money on the blockchain is no longer theoretical. Last year, we moved about $9 trillion in real terms. So you don't factor in bots, you don't factor in wash trading, you don't factor in these things, and then we have about $9 trillion of actual volume on the blockchain, which is about five times more than PayPal, which means these things actually work. It's not P anymore.
And what's incredibly interesting, and I don't think I need to convince you of this, is that especially people especially people like you wouldn't be in this room if we weren't potentially convinced of this, or convinced of this, or maybe you're trying to convince yourself of this, which I will. Um, these are fundamentally better rails than what we have today in traditional finance traditional finance . Um, and they're better because the ones we have today are pretty slow. They need days to settle their accounts. They are expensive.
There are many intermediaries. There are many commissions. Um, there are many borders. Usually it's more, uh Usually it's more, uh , silos that are interconnected. Um, it's, uh, mostly open during banking hours, which is pretty much nine to five.
It's very static. Er, and there is no financial benefit from using them. They are very commercialized. But if you compare it to on-chain rails, these are simply fundamentally better rails. You can do the same can do the same .
You can own money. You can create assets. You can move these assets. You can do finance. But they give you many advantages, namely you can have instant calculations.
You have almost free transactions. It's global 24/7. This is completely programmable. And most importantly for companies, it means millions of dollars in reduced commissions or additional potential revenue. And so the question is , why isn't every person or company rushing to do this?
Why isn't every financial company or CFO integrating stablecoins and blockchains directly into their stacks if they know they can actually have it? So it's very interesting to ask this question. Hmm, I want to raise my hands quickly. Can you raise your hand if you use blockchain in your daily life, i.e.
every day? Good. So I think there was one person, maybe two, and it's really interesting because imagine this conference is the most tech- savvy in the world in the blockchain industry. So if not, if we don't even use our own technology, will the world actually use it? This is pretty crazy.
So we think these are the best rails. We believe that on these better rails we can create better money. But then, if you look around when people raise their hands, there will only be two people in this room. Uh, so I think it's really interesting to think about this and try to understand why less than 1% of all humanity is actually using these rails today. So penetration is extremely low.
And here's the question, and this is what I'm going to talk about in my talk: even though we all think this is the best Rails that can bring companies millions of dollars every year, these companies are not using it on a large scale. Users don't use it on a large scale. So something is wrong. We have a better Rails, but we do n't use it. So the point I'm trying to get across today is that we've built better Rails, but we haven't built better money yet.
And to understand this, we need to go back to what money is in general. Money was created about 5,000 years ago. And money always worked the way it worked. And, in essence, money was private by default. So you could know how much you had.
Your bank probably knew how much you had. Maybe the taxman could know how much you had, but no one else. This was private for you and a few contractors few contractors . So this was what we call selective disclosure. But today, what we have is completely public.
So every transaction you make on the blockchain leaks all your information. So it's really interesting, if you think about it, or it's actually pretty bad and pretty crazy, because from Keri Shells to cash and gold and wire transfers, we've had this, um, very consistent way of dealing with money, which is that money is private and I can use it however I like. But now there's this anomaly, and we've broken the fundamental model of money by making it completely public. So imagine, especially now with artificial intelligence, all I need is an internet connection and a few tokens a day, and if you use this at scale, I can know everything about your company, everything about your flows, and everything about you. Uh, and it's very dangerous, and I'm going to prove this point when it comes to public blockchains and public money, everything leaks.
So it can't be used, it's not integrated by companies. And here are a few examples. But then a very simple example is, essentially, being a CFO. So, you're the CFO of a company, you need to manage payroll, and here you are at the end of the month. Okay, I'm going to send people their pay slips.
I'm going to do it on the blockchain. Several companies have entered into this agreement and others. But now the problem arises that everyone can see other people's salaries. So now an employee comes up to you and asks, “Excuse me, why am I getting paid less than this guy?” Or why is my salary, ahem, lower than average?
" Can I get a raise?" So now it's politically impossible in the company, hmm. All your treasury, that is, your balance sheet, is public, etc. All B2B payments, whether your partners or counterparties, every single transaction you make on the blockchain is completely public. So it's not really used by companies and institutions today, and at some point it stops being a business.
This year in particular, in 2025, research shows that there have been over 72 physical attacks in the world, which means that if you own money on blockchain, if you are a company that uses money on blockchain, if you pay your employees on blockchain, if you do these things, then most likely you are very... there is a high probability that this is a real risk. Uh this is a real risk. Uh , there were kidnappings , there were tortures, there were really horrible things that happened because of the publicity of the money, uh the publicity of the money, uh , and because we broke these rules. And so if people start using this at a large scale, which large scale, which they should, essentially, because they're better at Rails, and we should be able to make better money on better Rails, uh, that's going to be a very big problem.
And so this is the real reason why implementation is slowing down. We have the answer: we have violated the fundamental rule of money regarding confidentiality and selective disclosure of your assets. Uh, and so we need to create some systems that adapt to how companies, users, and people have used money over the last 5,000 years. We should not force people to switch to a new system. The hardest thing you can do in the world is actually disrupt a behavior.
Therefore, companies need privacy by default, compliance, and control. They need workflows and approvals. They need integrations that meet the requirements, such as APIs and SDKs that are used to integrate into their flows. But what they get is that with blockchains and these better rails, everything instantly becomes public by default. Um, a match that seems to be screwed on and is not actually inside the chain.
Um inside the chain. Um , they need to move into a new world that they don't fully understand. They don't understand the risks or benefits. They need to adapt to the chain and integrate it. Well, we need to create systems that adapt to real companies, not the other way around.
Um, and a lot of people understood that. This isn't the first time people have talked about privacy. Privacy has been around for many years in cryptocurrency, and there have been many very successful projects and less successful projects. But I would say it was never quite niche, and it always remained quite niche because we were between a rock and a hard place, especially companies that wanted to use blockchains privately, because they had the choice to use private mixers that weren't really built for them at all . It was more of a cypher-punk ideal, and which mostly didn't meet the requirements or were corrupted.
So it was absolutely forbidden for companies and was not integrated. And then on the other hand, there were a lot of companies, and some of these companies that I worked for and that I created, were creating new blockchains that are fully private, fully interoperable, new L1, new L2, which are incredible projects. But now the difficulty is also that you are breaking network effects. So you have no liquidity, you have no users, you need to launch a whole ecosystem, you have no protocols, no developers, most likely a new virtual machine in a new language. And so you lose the whole Lindy effect and all the work we've done on Ethereum over the last 1015 years.
And so those were the two options that companies and people had. And I think those were two pretty bad options, but now things are changing. What we need, and the missing element, in my vision, is something that encompasses three main things. And the three main things are privacy. So you should be able to use blockchains privately, have private money on the blockchain, and use these better rails privately.
You have to be able to have AML compliance, counter- terrorism financing, potentially KYC, potentially KYB, have all of these things fully first-class citizens, and you have to have them fully integrated into your flows. So, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, and blockchain usage that you want to use. Uh, most companies and most institutions want to use blockchains with network effects. Uh, and that's why these blockchains, Ethereum, Solana, and other blockchains that have a bunch of users, that have a bunch of users, uh, because they're important to them, to their flows, and also to their trust. And so, in my vision, there is a missing element.
And that's exactly what we're building at Unlink. We are essentially a compliance and privacy mechanism for companies that want to move money via blockchain. We have several stands, for example, one here, one there. We are also in talks at the startup stage and we are going to do a lot of events and I am very, very excited to build this world. I want to imagine the future with you and our partners.
We are collaborating with Monad. We are partnering with Oiler and many, many others to move these flows across blockchains; attract companies, attract institutions, attract users. And the future that I want to build together, potentially with your companies and your users, is this: How can we move all of your streams and trillions of dollars, essentially, onto these better rails? And I think we'll do that through compliance, integration, and privacy. Thank you.
Automatic transcript — names and jargon may be misspelled.